Wednesday Potpourri

First, on Monday I offered some comments on the new American anti-Semitism, which has invaded and infested the academic and literary worlds.

I had not seen it at the time, but James Kirchick opined on the phenomenon for the New York Times the same day.

I give you some of his comments, the first on the charge of genocide, leveled against the Israeli government: 

One of the greatest mass delusions of the 21st century is the belief that Israel is committing a genocide against Palestinians. This grotesque moral inversion — in which a genocidal terrorist organization that instigated a war with Israel by committing the largest massacre of Jews since the Holocaust is absolved of responsibility while the victim of Hamas’s attack is charged with perpetrating the worst crime known to man — began taking shape before Israel even launched its ground invasion of Gaza.

And then, as I pointed out, the group that has been opposing what it calls book bans is now working to boycott authors who are Jewish:

There’s a distasteful irony in a literary community that has gone to the barricades fighting book “bans” now rallying to boycott authors based on their ethnoreligious identity. For a growing set of writers, declaring one’s belief that the world’s only Jewish state is a genocidal entity whose dismantlement is necessary for the advancement of humankind is a political fashion statement, a bauble one parades around in order to signify being on the right team. As was Stalinism for an earlier generation of left-wing literary intellectuals, so is antisemitism becoming the avant-garde.

Second, one recalls the Biden administration’s abject failure to stop the Yemeni Houthis from disrupting shipping through the Red Sea.

Add one more mess to the list of the administration’s dubious achievements. Recall that the Biden crowd chose to build a pier in Gaza, the better to deliver humanitarian aid to terrorists.

What could go wrong? In fact, everything.

Noal Pollak wrote this on Twitter:

Update on the Biden admin's Gaza pier to nowhere: Parts of it have broken free and washed up in Israel. And virtually all of the aid that was delivered was stolen by Hamas. A $320M fleecing of the US taxpayer. There should be hearings.

The Washington Post brings us up to date on the progress of the floating pier. 

The Pentagon has suspended the delivery of humanitarian aid to Gaza via its floating pier after mishaps where U.S. military vessels were beached, one U.S. service member was critically injured, and sections of the structure were ripped free in bad weather.

But at least our military is diverse.

Third,  in the meantime, the Biden effort to appease Iran is proceeding apace. The Wall Street Journal reported:

The Biden administration is pressing European allies to back off plans to rebuke Iran for advances in its nuclear program as it seeks to keep tensions with Tehran from escalating before the autumn’s U.S. presidential election, according to diplomats involved in discussions.

Fourth, a side effect of the mass migration promoted by the Biden administration. Schools across America are forced to accept pupils who are incapable of speaking English, doing any math or following lessons. 

The Wall Street Journal reports:

Millions of migrants, most seeking asylum, have crossed the border in recent years and have been allowed to settle in the U.S. until a federal immigration judge decides their fate, a process that can take years. Among the record numbers, federal data suggest, are as many as one million children who have arrived with their families or on their own since 2021.

They are settling in cities and entering public schools around the U.S., adding financial and logistical strains in communities where they have arrived in large numbers. Districts are faced with the need for additional teachers and staff who can teach English and space for new students, often while waiting for promised supplemental federal or state funding.

There is more to the problem than money. If you put a few of these children in your child’s classroom they will disrupt the proceedings and prevent your child from learning. One more blow for the idiotocracy.

Fifth, meanwhile on the transmania front, the following news comes to us from TransgenderTrend on Twitter:

A new study shows 95% of young women on testosterone developed pelvic floor dysfunction. Participants, youngest 18, average age 28, had bladder and bowel symptoms that medics would expect to see in a woman after the menopause. What did medics expect?

Sixth, and Wesley Yang, also on Twitter offers this comment on transmania:

The evidence continues to accrue that the transgender movement is a cult of medicalized self-harm that inflicts lifelong ill-health onto the confused children it successfully targets for induction into its ranks by an army of profiteering enablers in a rapidly growing industry

Seventh, I recommend some Xanax. Democrats are trembling with trepidation over the prospect that Joe Biden is about to lose the upcoming presidential election.

Politico reports on the emotional condition of serious Democratic operatives:

A pervasive sense of fear has settled in at the highest levels of the Democratic Party over President Joe Biden’s reelection prospects, even among officeholders and strategists who had previously expressed confidence about the coming battle with Donald Trump.

All year, Democrats had been on a joyless and exhausting grind through the 2024 election. But now, nearly five months from the election, anxiety has morphed into palpable trepidation, according to more than a dozen party leaders and operatives. And the gap between what Democrats will say on TV or in print, and what they’ll text their friends, has only grown as worries have surged about Biden’s prospects.

Eighth, some sobering thoughts from Bret Stephens in the New York Times. I will not say that these are especially original thoughts, but still, they are clear and cogent, something we need when the Biden administration has been promoting a path to defeat in Gaza.

In the past 50 years, the United States has gotten good at losing wars.

We withdrew in humiliation from Saigon in 1975, Beirut in 1984, Mogadishu in 1993 and Kabul in 2021. We withdrew, after the tenuous victory of the surge, from Baghdad in 2011, only to return three years later after ISIS swept through northern Iraq and we had to stop it (which, with the help of Iraqis and Kurds, we did). We won limited victories against Saddam Hussein in 1991 and Muammar el-Qaddafi in 2011, only to fumble the endgames.

Those who are whining about civilian casualties have forgotten how many civilian casualties we produced during wars when we emerged victorious:

In World War II, Allied bombers killed an estimated 10,000 civilians in the Netherlands, 60,000 in France, 60,000 in Italy and hundreds of thousands of Germans. All this was part of a declared Anglo-American policy to undermine “the morale of the German people to the point where their capacity for armed resistance is fatally weakened.” We pursued an identical policy against Japan, where bombardment killed, according to some estimates, nearly one million civilians.

Victories are often morally compromised. Defeats can be morally pure. A useful distinction:

But they also tend to canonize leaders who, faced with the awful choice of evils that every war presents, nonetheless chose morally compromised victories over morally pure defeats.

Now the Biden team wants Ukraine and Israel to lose.

Right now, the Biden administration is trying to restrain Israel and aid Ukraine while operating under both illusions. It is asking them to fight their wars in roughly the same way that the United States has fought its own wars in recent decades — with limited means, a limited stomach for what it takes to win and an eye on the possibility of a negotiated settlement. 

A cease-fire with Hamas that leaves the group in control of Gaza means it will inevitably start another war, just as it has five times before. It also vindicates the strategy of using civilian populations as human shields — something Hezbollah will be sure to copy in its next full-scale war with Israel.

Ninth, I have been catching up on the new season of the BRAVO series, Summer House. There is a certain silliness in the behaviors of thirtysomethings acting like teenagers, but that is not the reason why I keep watching the show. It is a reason why I hesitate to watch the show. It’s not fun to watch young people making fools of themselves on national television.

You see, my interest is anthropological. This show allows us to witness the influence of therapy and even feminism on human relationships. It shows us women destroying their relationships and even their marriages, for the best therapeutic reasons. The women who do not have relationships to wreck spend their time trying to help their friends to wreck their relationships.

And, behind it all, lies therapy. The women in question, and even the men, have been therapied. They seem to think that a relationship should be a therapy session. They traffic in barely intelligible psychobabble, and seem not to have the least clue about what it means to be a wife. 

Thus far, we have seen one therapy session. The therapist embarrasses herself and her profession. The scene will show you that I have not been kidding when I tell you that most therapy is bad news. 

The males in question seem well-meaning enough. They go along for the ride. They try to be more womanly, ultimately to fail. 

And yet, the show makes clear the simple fact, not to be ignored or forgotten, that, when it comes to relationships, women are in charge, whether they like it or not.

In the Summer House women assert themselves, insist on imposing their views, fail to support or to show care for their men, and end up lost in an orgy of complaining. Then they get together to console themselves, in something like a coven.

You’ve come a long way, baby.

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